Defenders Magazine

Of Plovers and Plows

Saving a prairie bird, one nestling at a time

by Daniel Glick

© Fritz Knopf

The spindle-legged shorebird, seemingly out of place amidst rows of newly tilled earth a thousand miles from the ocean, hobbles away from its nest, feigning a broken wing. Biologist Carolyn Stolzenburg, painfully aware that the flailing mountain plover is trying to draw her away from its precious clutch, quickly dismounts her ATV and approaches three speckled olive eggs camouflaged among the dirt clods. She strides between a pair of orange markers protruding from furrows stretching across the landscape. With measured haste, she places the eggs into a container of water to calculate how soon the chicks will emerge. The eggs bob on the surface, telling her that the chicks are days, maybe hours, away from hatching. 

Stolzenburg remounts her vehicle and notes the GPS coordinates and float test data, pleased that her efforts to flag this plover nest have worked so far: Not only have the eggs survived the recent millet planting because the orange markers alerted the farmer to avoid plowing the nest, but the field also provided protection from coyotes and foxes that are reluctant to venture across open agricultural ground. Having dodged the plow and the predator, a few more mountain plovers stand a chance against a rising tide of development along their Colorado prairie nesting grounds.

The mountain plover (Charadrius montanus) previously thrived in the short-grass prairies of the Great Plains. (John James Audubon mistakenly christened it "mountain" plover because it was found within eyeshot of the Rockies.) The 8-inch bird with a tan back and wings and a white breast and belly once bred in an area stretching from Alberta to the Texas panhandle, scratching out the mere suggestion of nests in landscapes grazed by bison, pronghorn and prairie dogs. In these simple nests, the female often lays double clutches of three eggs apiece; the male watches over one, the female the other—and both shade their encapsulated offspring from the sun with their wings that blend seamlessly into the earthen expanses. The plover possesses such an uncanny ability to hide in plain sight on the prairie that biologists dubbed it the "prairie ghost." 

Like many birds that depend on meadows and prairies, however, the future holds a list of pointed challenges that could make that "ghost" moniker all too real. During the 20th century, after the buffalo no longer roamed and prairies increasingly transformed into crop fields, parking lots and subdivisions, mountain plover numbers began to decline. First recognized as a candidate species for protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1982, the plover's federal fate languished for 17 years. Then in 1999, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the mountain plover as a threatened species, citing a 63 percent decline in continental populations between 1966 and 1991.

The proposed listing alarmed many agricultural interests, since much of the plover's territory, both summer and winter, included vast tracts of private land under cultivation—and federal regulation was just about as popular with farmers as drought. (The mountain plover's known U.S. wintering grounds are in California's agricultural heartlands of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys.) The proposal also drew opposition from energy developers because of the overlap between mountain plover "core breeding sites" in Wyoming and potential gas or oil plays. In September 2003, the proposed listing was withdrawn because, the Bush administration said, it had miscalculated the rate of species decline and, in fact, plover populations remained stable.

Conservation groups cried foul, suspecting political interference. The Bush administration had sown a well-deserved seed of distrust among conservationists because of its slow-motion efforts to list species: According to the Endangered Species Coalition, the Bush administration has invoked the Endangered Species Act to protect threatened and endangered species fewer times than any administration since the act passed in 1973—and never did it without being sued or petitioned by environmental groups and/or scientists.

In 2006, Forest Guardians and the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance sued the federal government to list the mountain plover as a threatened species. The suit was filed just weeks after conservation groups released documents showing how Bush administration political appointee Julie MacDonald had repeatedly interfered with government biologists' recommendations about species protection. The mountain plover's fate has not been directly implicated in these decisions, but it shares habitat with animals such as the white-tailed prairie dog that are at the center of that storm. (The lawsuit is currently pending.)

That habitat, scattered across the Great Plains and intermountain West, is subject to an onslaught of energy development and the continued expansion of agricultural practices such as pesticide use, sodbusting and prairie dog poisoning, says Jonathan Proctor, southern Rockies/Great Plains representative of Defenders of Wildlife. Prairie dog colonies provide ideal plover habitat, and swift foxes, burrowing owls and various raptors are all at risk along with the mountain plover if their best natural habitat continues to degrade. "We're not doing nearly enough to conserve and restore these animals' strongholds," he says.

While the mountain plover's political fate remained in limbo, conservation groups, biologists and farmers had decided to do something to help the species without the backing of federal law. Around the time the listing controversy hit the headlines, retired U.S. Geological Survey biologist Fritz Knopf, a leading plover expert who drives a black GMC truck with the Colorado license plate that says "PLOVER," had a brainstorm. Knopf recognized that the plover's natural habitat of hoof-trampled prairie was, ironically, mimicked pretty well by tractors. Its main food sources of grasshoppers, beetles, crickets and other insects—"anything that's crawling," says Knopf—also liked cropland. If farmers could avoid destroying plover nests during the spring planting, he figured, perhaps plovers and plows could co-exist. He and some colleagues developed a program to solicit permission from landowners to access their property and mark where plover nests were during the eggs' 30-day incubation period. All the farmers had to do was to lift their planters over the nests, conspicuously marked by bright orange stakes, or cultivate around them. 

Colorado's Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, along with the state Division of Wildlife, put this program into action. Colorado is key to the plover's continued existence, since more than half of the world's population nests in the state before taking off to winter in California and Mexico. The program launched in 2003, with the goals of increasing plover survival rates during the crucial nesting season and educating people about mountain plovers. Farmers such as Leonard Ball, who grows millet, winter wheat and other crops on his Weld County land in north-central Colorado, signed on, agreeing to give biologists 48 hours' notice before plowing so they could come and mark the nests. "We don't mind driving around the stakes," Ball says. "The birds need some help, and I don't know anybody who wouldn't do that." 

The key phrase in the program is "voluntary cooperative partnerships." Many property owners worry about government regulation should they ever allow federal or state biologists on their land to look for endangered species. The plover program assured landowners that the goal was to protect birds and avoid government mandates. It wasn't such a hard sell, especially after biologists started finding nesting plovers in areas they hadn't been documented and word-of-mouth spread support for the project. In Colorado, 96 farmers in 16 counties enrolled in 2006, which led to biologists locating and marking 134 mountain plover nests. "The landowners that participate in the program are conservation-minded," says Ross Lock of the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, a nonprofit educational and conservation group. "None of them want to run over nests."

That kind of innovative and cooperative thinking, figures plover expert Knopf, needs to take hold across the country. Since more than 90 percent of all federally listed threatened and endangered species spend at least part of their time on private land, the effort to engage private landowners in conservation efforts is crucial, whether it's with mountain plovers, red-cockaded woodpeckers or Chiracahua leopard frogs. "All the polarization between conservationists and private landowners isn't helping anything," Knopf says.

Improving nesting success, of course, is not the whole conservation story, and that's where the plover's recovery gets a little more complicated. The list of threats to the birds is a long one, and includes oil and gas development in Wyoming, pesticide use in agriculture, and the disappearance of giant kangaroo rats, ground squirrels and Tule elk in California that used to churn up the soil to create good plover winter habitat.

Like all migratory species, plovers need places to go after they fledge, and habitat loss in both summer and winter range poses the most obvious threat to plovers, as it does to most species. The real problem in figuring out what is happening with mountain plovers, Knopf says, is nobody really knows with certainty what happens when the migrating birds leave places like Leonard Ball's farm. "As a public outreach platform, it's been successful," Knopf says of the nest marking, but adds that it is also critical to undertake research about the rest of the plover's life cycle.

Defenders' Proctor applauds the attempts to engage private landowners in conservation, but warns that without a second prong to the conservation attack—preserving and restoring prairie dog colonies that provide the mountain plovers' naturally preferred summer habitat—the bird's future is in jeopardy.

Still, in the ongoing wars over species conservation, a program that demonstrates how endangered species protection and private property rights can co-exist successfully is a wonderfully rare find. Here in Weld County, agricultural and rural sprawl has crept across the landscape like an invasive species ever since the bison and pronghorn roamed the plains and prairie dogs burrowed into the earth by the millions. 

Biologist Stolzenburg conducts her painstaking work of finding and marking the plover nests without any illusions that the voluntary program alone will save the species. Still, she is convinced that it's worth doing. "This is a pre-emptive strike," she says, knowing full well that the plover will have to adapt to changing land use across its range if it is going to thrive again. "The bison are all gone and the prairie dogs have plague."

From where Stolzenburg and I stand on the western fringe of the Great Plains, the crest of the purple Continental Divide seems close enough to touch. Killdeer, bull snakes, ferruginous hawks, long-billed curlews, swift fox and coyotes share the landscape. Here, conservation and agriculture have cautiously shaken hands, with a tangible result.

As we drive the ATV to the field adjacent to where we saw the first nest, she points out another nesting plover's broken wing dance, and we admire its distinctive coloring. We then spy three hatchlings, probably only an hour old, their shattered eggs surrounding them like crushed seashells. Within hours, the tiny birds will be able to hop away; by the time the fields are ready for harvest, they will be fledging their way south and then west, heading off to an uncertain future.

"I have to learn to be a realistic conservationist," says Stolzenburg, peering at the newly hatched trio through binoculars, then glancing around at a prairie transformed by the plow. "But at least I know these birds are real."

Learn more about the grasslands habitat.

Colorado-based writer Daniel Glick is the author of Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth (Public Affairs, 2003).